The Athens News ran a great article on my residency at Hocking Valley Community Residential Center. Following is a gallery of photos from A-News photographer Ed Venrick and then the complete text of the article.
Teacher offers youth offenders a 6-string rehab program
Karen Zolka
July 24, 2008
Editor’s note: The full names of the young offenders in this article are not being used out of regard for their privacy.
You walk through a set of double glass doors adorned with announcements printed on yellow cardboard. You continue past a poster with an assortment of pictures, and past a ceramic mural that stretches from the ceiling to the floor. While walking around a circular hallway, you hear snippets of conversation, doors closing and the sound of music.
“I think some of the other staff must be like, ‘Oh God,’ because it gets kind of noisy up there,” Darrell Gladish said with a smile. “They’re all into it.”
This isn’t a floor in Glidden Hall, the music building at Ohio University. Nor is this a private music conservatory. It’s actually the Hocking Valley Community Residential Center, a juvenile correctional facility in Nelsonville.
“I’m not trying to get them to be great guitar players; I want to get them used to the guitar,” says local guitarist John Horne.
For the next several weeks, Horne is the Artist in Residence at the Residential Center, a program sponsored by the Ohio Arts Council. Horne will meet daily with 22 “adjudicated” minors.
Their crimes would be considered felonies if the minor were older than 18. Substance abuse and theft can fall into this category. The boys at the center range in age from 12 to 18 years old, says Gladish, a youth specialist at the facility.
The facility’s mission is to try to rehabilitate the adolescent boys through positive means, instead of locking them up in a cell, explains Gladish. The program strives to rehabilitate the boys, usually in a four- to six-month period, so they can return as members of their community.
This can be accomplished through numerous programs offered at the correctional facility, Gladish says, including the residency programs. The residency programs, such as the one Horne is teaching, are provided to expose the minors to different activities and teach them new skill sets. Before this program, most of the boys had never held a guitar before, Gladish says.
Horne, who graduated from Duquesne University in Pennsylvania with a degree in music performance, notes that the boys come from various backgrounds. “I wanted this to be a creative experience,” he says.
In addition to learning how to hold a guitar, Horne’s students are also learning how to write lyrics and put them to music. In the first week alone, each student was responsible for composing four measures of music.
With Horne’s help, the tunes were strung together and had lyrics set to them. Horne does acknowledge that everyone has different tastes in music, but that just makes the collaborative pieces interesting.
Two program attendees, John and Adam, say they enjoy Horne’s guitar sessions because Horne doesn’t lecture too much or get angry if they miss a chord. Both agree that the laid-back atmosphere is helping them learn how to play the guitar.
John, a 17 year-old former football player, also played the snare drum in the marching band.
Though he has experience with percussion instruments, he says that he never really knew how to play the guitar — at most he would strum one string at a time. The Jimi Hendrix fan says that he now knows much more than one string and will probably continue playing after Horne’s residency is over.
Adam, a 16-year-old sports fan, says that before starting to learn guitar from Horne, he could play half of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.” Now, after less than two weeks with Horne, Adam can finish the Southern-rock standard and also learned how to play Tom Petty’s “Free Falling.” Adam admits that he is building up his fingers and can now play for more than an hour at a time.
Not only is Horne teaching his students how to play music, he is also teaching them about different music genres. Earlier this month, the boys attended a concert by The Jazztet, Horne’s jazz ensemble, on the College Green at Ohio University.
John admits that he had never listened to an entire jazz song before The Jazztet concert, but he listened to the entire show. Adam adds that it’s not his first choice in music, but the group, well, “they’ve got skill.”
Gladish, also a guitar enthusiast, says that before Horne’s residency he would sometimes play for the boys during their down time. Now that they know how to play, he says he’s always being asked to lend out one of the facility’s eight guitars. “On Saturdays, I may have some boys playing for two or three hours,” says Gladish. “You couldn’t have a more positive way to spend your time.”
John Horne will be at the Hocking Valley Community Residential Center through Aug. 3.
If you’re a regular visitor to the website you’ll notice that I’ve made some changes recently.
The site has grown by leaps and bounds over the past few years and now has far more pages and sub-pages of information than I can reasonably list in a single menu so I’ve decided to simplify things a little and feature links to the eight pages that are most often visited right at the top of the page. In the right-hand sidebar you’ll now find a menu called “Find Everything Here” with links to the site map (a menu of all my pages) and the blog archives (a list of all my blog entries by month). There’s also search bar (which I may eventually change this from a local search to a site-specific search with Google) and a few outgoing links to related websites. While this approach seems to keep much of the information here hidden away I hope that it will keep the layout cleaner and make the site easier to navigate.
As I find time I’ll be addressing a few details such as some text alignment issues I’m having, adding links to related pages within the site and reinstating the information that was originally contained in the custom sidebar the each page used to have. For some reason WordPress 2.5 totally screwed that up!
I have faith that you can find your way to the important stuff easily and that you’ll also find your way to the site’s nooks and crannies with just a little exploration. Let me know if you run into any problems!
July is just around the corner and you are invited to join The Jazztet for two lunchtime concerts at Ohio University. If the weather is nice we’ll be playing on the green at the West Portico of Memorial Auditorium. Bring a friend, a couple of chairs, and something to munch on. In case of rain, we’ll see you in the Front Room inside Baker Center.
The details:
Tuesday July 8 2008 12:00pm
Noon Jazz Series with The Jazztet
West Portico of Memorial Auditorium or The Front Room in case of rain.
Ohio University
Athens, OH 45701
Tuesday July 29 2008 12:00pm
Noon Jazz Series with The Jazztet
West Portico of Memorial Auditorium or The Front Room in case of rain.
Ohio University
Athens, OH 45701
I need to figure out a way to create a database of songs and tag them the musical and technical challenges they present. For example, today one of my students wanted to work on “Fly Away” by Lenny Kravitz. This song is an excellent device for students working on mastering their E-form barre chords (since 4 out of the 5 chords in the song use this shape) and eighth- and sixteenth-note rhythms. Other examples of songs that I use to help teach specific techniques include “Dust in the Wind” for pinch-pattern Travis picking and “Wildwood Flower” for improving right-hand string skipping. A lot of the time I can remember these things but sometimes I can’t. I have to do I little updating of the website this Summer, so I may see if it’s possible to use WordPress to tag some of these ideas and make them searchable, though it would be even better as an off-line database since I don’t have internet access in my main teaching studio at Studio E Music.
Students:
Spring Session is coming to a close on May 24. Below is the lesson schedule for Summer 2008.
Summer Session
June 2 through 28
No lessons in July
August 4 through 30
Advance payment for entire session (8 Lessons) only $120. A 10% discount!
I know that many of you have vacations and other family activities planned for the coming Summer months. If you plan on continuing lessons during the Summer but have some occasional conflicts, just please let me know when to expect you in advance, and we’ll adjust your payments accordingly.
This was my first year having a predetermined schedule including 2 recitals for the entire year with discounts available for advance payment. It definitely took time and planning to pull all of that together, but I think it was worth the effort. I hope that having the scheduling information and payment discounts available made a difference to you. If there’s anything I can do to make guitar lessons more productive or to make the business end of things more convenient let me know. I’m always open to suggestions.
I’ll be making the schedule for the 2008-2009 soon and will pass along the information once it’s finalized.
Thank you for your continued patronage, it’s a privilege to work with you.
John
